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This article proposes a novel soft pneumatic actuator inspired by the segmented structure of earthworms. The actuator adopts a new structure of free bottom to eliminate the constraint of the bottom and enlarge the bending capacity of the actuator. Through simulation, it is found that the new actuator improves the bending angle by 20% and output force by 40% compared with traditional actuator. Moreover, key parameters of the actuator are analyzed to acquire their effect on bending angle and bending linearity. A guideline for the design and optimization of the actuator is proposed. To validate the simulation results, we build up a test platform to test bending angle and output force of the actuators, the results shows that errors between the simulation and the test remained in the limit of about 10%. Finally, a three-jaw soft gripper is fabricated and its grasping strategy is studied. The quantitative analysis shows its excellent adaptability and load capacity.

According to the requirement of wing weight estimation and frequent adjustments during aircraft conceptual design, a wing weight estimation method considering the constraints of structural strength and stiffness is proposed to help designers make wing weight estimations rapidly and accurately. This method implements weight predictions on the basis of structure weight optimization with stiffness constraints and strength constraints, which include achievement of wing shape parametric modeling, rapid structure layout, finite element (FE) model automated generation, load calculation, structure analysis, weight optimization, and weight computed based on modeling. A software tool is developed with this wing weight estimation method. This software can realize the whole process of wing weight estimation with the method and the workload of wing weight estimation is reduced because much of the work can be completed by the software. Finally, an example is given to illustrate that this weight estimation method is effective.

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Based on the features of environment perception 978-1-4244-3504-3/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE